China Digital Times (CDT) » Chen Guangchenghttp://chinadigitaltimes.net
Covering China from CyberspaceTue, 31 Mar 2015 19:27:58 +0000en-UShourly1China Digital Timeshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/wp-content/themes/cdt/images/feedlogo.pnghttp://chinadigitaltimes.net
Meme of the Week: Batman vs. Military Coathttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/03/meme-of-the-week-batman-vs-military-coat/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/03/meme-of-the-week-batman-vs-military-coat/#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 21:05:15 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=182209The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China’s online “resistance discourse,” used to mock and subvert the official language around censorship and political correctness.

You made it to Beijing, and after some negotiation and a car chase, you got it into the U.S. embassy. You write that once you arrived, the U.S. government kept changing its position. What kind of impact did that experience have on your view of the U.S.?

When I first got to the embassy, they were very, very good to me. You could tell the staff members were all excited. They thought they were doing something important and right. But not too long after I arrived, there was meeting, I think in the White House, and that’s when things started to change. After another meeting three days later, the situation completely switched and the new order was to get me out of the embassy as quickly as possible to avoid have a bad influence on relations with the Communist Party. Prior to that I believed deeply and without question in the U.S. as a defender of democracy and human rights. Of course, afterwards I realized politicians don’t always think from the standpoint of the people. But if you look around the world, even though the U.S. is sometimes weak in the face of dictators, it’s still the best defender of freedom there is.

[…] Now you’re in the U.S., which a very different place than rural Shandong. What has been the hardest thing to get used to?

The language. I didn’t have much time to study English in China. As for the other differences, the different customs or whatever, it’s not a big deal. When it comes to kindness or the pursuit of social justice, I actually don’t think Americans and Chinese people are very different. It’s just that Chinese people live in an authoritarian state and have been oppressed for too long, so they’re a little bit careful and afraid to speak out. [Source]

Also in the Wall Street Journal, lawyer Jerome Cohen, a close friend of Chen’s who participated in the negotiations after his arrival at the U.S. Embassy, writes his account of Chen’s stay there:

In his book, Mr. Chen says he felt enormous pressure to leave the embassy, despite his great fears that the Chinese government would not respect the compromise in practice. I can testify to those pressures and fears since I had extensive telephone conversations with him at the time.

The calls came about at Mr. Koh’s request as a way to allow Mr. Chen to discuss the situation with an American friend in whom he had expressed confidence. So on each of the two days before he left the embassy, I received briefings from Mr. Koh and Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, and then I talked with Mr. Chen.

On the first day we talked, after hearing Mr. Chen’s repeated fears, I advised him to stay in the embassy. Meanwhile U.S. diplomats were urging him to consider the anticipated drawbacks, including the State Department’s doubts about the legality of harboring him as well as the certainty of the Chinese government’s outrage.

After a second day of persuasion by U.S. diplomats, Mr. Chen was significantly less fearful and seemed willing to assume the risk of leaving the embassy. I urged him to ask that President Barack Obama personally issue a statement promising continuing concern for Mr. Chen’s security. Although no presidential statement was forthcoming, Secretary Clinton did offer her own assurance as she arrived in Beijing for the Security and Economic Dialogue. [Source]

The rescue of the 43-year-old “barefoot lawyer” featured prominently in Mrs Clinton’s manifesto-memoir, Hard Choices, as a triumph of white-knuckle diplomacy that also respected Mr Chen’s individual rights and wishes.

She wrote that “we had done what Chen said he wanted every step of the way”, echoing her public remarks at the time in Beijing that “all of our efforts with Mr Chen have been guided by his choices and our values”.

But Mr Chen, while expressly grateful for being given refuge first at the embassy and later in the US, directly contradicted Mrs Clinton in his 322-page memoir The Barefoot Lawyer, a copy of which has been seen by The Telegraph.

“The country that most consistently advocated for democracy […] had simply given in”
Far from having his wishes respected, Mr Chen described how he was relentlessly “pressured to leave” the embassy for a Beijing hospital and forced to accept an “absurdly inadequate” deal on pain of the Chinese government accusing him of treason. [Source]

In a copy of Chen’s unpublished memoir, The Barefoot Lawyer, obtained by Foreign Policy, Chen details the promises U.S. officials made to him — and then broke. According to Chen, Kurt Campbell, the then-assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and the highest-ranking United States diplomat directly involved in the affair, said that he and then-American Ambassador Gary Locke would personally reunite the dissident with his family.

“‘I swear on my mother’s name, on the name of my children, in the name of God, that Ambassador Locke and I will go to get your family,’” Campbell told Chen inside the embassy, according to the dissident’s account. Campbell then asked Chen to make a statement “that the American government has been extremely helpful and that you completely trust us.”

Campbell didn’t keep his promise to go to rural China and bring Chen’s family to Beijing. Instead, it was Chinese officials who did so, causing Chen to fear for their safety. The Americans, Chen writes, “relinquished control of the situation.” Furious, Chen instead made a different statement, and complained that U.S. officials abandoned him, exacerbating a diplomatic tiff between Washington and Beijing. [Source]

Chinese officials are stepping up the use of the “illegal business” accusation to silence liberal voices. Last month, a Beijing district court sentenced the maker of a documentary on the Chinese Constitution, Shen Yongping, to a year in prison on the same charge. Mr. Shen’s lawyer called the charge an outrage and said Mr. Shen had not made the film for profit. It had been posted online and was available as a free download.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese president and leader of the Communist Party, has taken a tough line against political and social dissent, and many rights advocates have been detained and arrested since he took power in November 2012. His push of a leftist ideology with anti-Western overtones has also emboldened conservatives to go on the attack against liberal voices.

Mr. Guo has no lawyer at the moment because his lawyer, Xia Lin, was detained by officials in November, said Hu Jia, a rights activist who is a friend of Mr. Guo’s. Mr. Xia had also been representing Pu Zhiqiang, a well-known rights lawyer now in official custody who was charged in June with “creating a public disturbance.” Mr. Pu had attended a gathering in May at a scholar’s home in Beijing to honor the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. [Source]

A dozen or so police and state security officers took Guo Yushan from his home in a Beijing suburb early Thursday morning, his wife Pan Haixia said Sunday. “They came in with a warrant and took a lot of things as evidence, his computer, his iPhone, iPad and some hard drives,” Ms. Pan said.

The detention notice later given to the family said that he had been detained on suspicion of “picking quarrels” — a crime used in the prosecution of dozens of activists in recent years, according to a copy of the notice his lawyers posted online Saturday. The lawyers said they submitted an application to the Beijing No. 1 Detention Center to meet with Mr. Guo, but had yet to get a response.

A person answering the phone at the detention center on Sunday he had no information about the case. Beijing’s Public Security Bureau didn’t immediately respond to a faxed request for comment. [Source]

Mr. Guo’s apparent crime, according to friends, was “picking quarrels and provoking troubles,” the catchall charge that the Chinese authorities have been using with growing frequency in an effort to silence perceived enemies.

It is not clear what prompted his detention, but Mr. Guo could simply be the latest victim of a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent that has picked up steam since pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong began a campaign of civil disobedience two weeks ago. More than 50 people have been detained across China this month, including 10 people in Beijing who last week attended a private poetry reading, disrupted by the police, that was billed as an expression of solidarity with the protesters in Hong Kong.

“If this is related to Occupy Central, there’s a big possibility he will lose his freedom,” said Li Fangping, a rights lawyer, referring to the protests in Hong Kong, which Chinese leaders fear could spread beyond the former British colony.

But on Sunday, Mr. Guo’s friends said they were puzzled by his detention because he had deliberately kept a low profile in the year since the authorities shut down the independent research institute he had helped run. As far as they knew, Mr. Guo had refrained from making any public gestures in support of the demonstrations in Hong Kong. “He is very courageous yet extremely rational, gentle, and has a very strong awareness of the law,” said Chen Min, a friend and journalist who is better known by the pen name Xiao Shu. “His remarks and his activities are completely within the law.” [Source]

Xiao Yong used to hold up placards at protests, demanding that China’s leaders declare their assets in a call for political transparency and accountability. But he stopped after men began following his father around and urging him to persuade his 39-year-old son to drop his activism.

“I started to dread that my father’s health would deteriorate because of this,” said Xiao, a former employee at a state electrical utility in the southern city of Shaoyang. “The government was working on my family members, talking to them and instilling fear in them.”

To deter political and social activists, Chinese authorities routinely target their family members, friends and associates, pressuring them to be unwilling agents of persuasion or penalizing them directly.

[…] Sometimes they use more menacing tactics, such as blocking children from their schools, stripping spouses of employment and placing relatives under investigation for fraud. [Source]

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/09/china-targets-family-friends-coerce-activists/feed/0Costs and Consequences of Stability Maintenancehttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/08/costs-consequences-chinas-stability-maintenance/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/08/costs-consequences-chinas-stability-maintenance/#commentsWed, 20 Aug 2014 22:33:06 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=176461At Foreign Policy, Hu Jia describes his detentions and the house arrests between them, and discusses the treatment of other Chinese activists over the past ten years:

[…L]et’s just look at what has happened since 2004, when Beijing amended the Chinese Constitution to add the phrase, “The Chinese government respects and protects human rights.” 2004 was the fifth anniversary of the suppression of practitioners of the spiritual movement Falun Gong and the 15th anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which Chinese troops opened fire on unarmed protesters in the center of Beijing. That year, in the days leading up to the Tiananmen anniversary, I went to the square to present bouquets of flowers in memory of the victims. But police detained me. I told Yang Shun, a local officer in charge of Guobao, that my behavior was lawful and in accordance with the Constitution. He scoffed. “That was written to show the foreigners,” he told me.

[…] Will things get better? Some say they will improve because Zhou Yongkang, the former head of the Central Political and Legislative Affairs Committee (CPLC) and the official responsible for “security maintenance,” is now out of the picture. And many people praise Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown on Zhou and his allies.

But the National Security Commission that Xi established in November 2013 is really just a super CPLC. All this is a power struggle within the CCP – what the common people refer to as “dog bites dog.” After Xi eliminates his enemies in the CCP, he will be able to use all the resources at his disposal to move against dissidents. I believe that eventually, China will move in the direction of democracy. But in the meantime, the coldest winter for Chinese dissidents has not yet arrived. [Source]

Gao’s year of deprivation of rights could stretch into indefinite isolation, surveillance, and pressure to cooperate with the authorities. Inner Mongolian rights activist Hada, “released” from prison at the end of a fifteen-year sentence in December 2010, is still in a “black jail” in Hohhot, denied medical treatment for the severe depression and paranoia he has developed over 18 years of incarceration, but reportedly supplied with plenty of alcohol. His family are continually threatened over their “non-cooperation” and persistence in making Hada’s condition known outside China, using trumped-up drugs charges against his son and ever-tighter restrictions on his wife’s links with outside world.

So let’s not celebrate too soon the abolition, sort of, of re-education through labour, the banning, twice in one year, of interrogation through torture (it was already illegal), or even the reduced application of the death penalty in China, when activists like Gao and Hada can be so effectively destroyed without the need for lethal injection or a firing squad.

The focus of the next CCP plenum, to be held in October 2014, will be the rule of law in China. Perhaps, to paraphrase Gandhi on western civilization, party leaders will conclude that it would be a good idea. [Source]

Gao’s case is extreme, but even ordinary citizens can find their lives overturned by the arbitrary and opaque consequences of government monitoring. At The New York Times, Murong Xuecun reports how he gained access to his own official personal file, and found it loaded with white lies by well-meaning teachers. But he cites other cases such as that of Tang Guoji, who was made unemployable by comments entered in apparent retaliation for complaints about teaching quality.

Now, with the advent of the Internet age, Beijing has new ways to control the populace. In May, the government announced it was rolling out a national social credit network. This will include a much more powerful personal file system, which, according to the People’s Daily, will collate information on every aspect of the life of every citizen, including records of online activities.

If the government deems a person’s activities “seriously untrustworthy,” his or her everyday life will be jeopardized. It is easy to envision a future where banks can cancel mortgages, the transport bureau can cancel drivers’ licenses, and hospitals can refuse treatment.

For the first half of my life a malevolent spirit in the form of a personal file envelope followed wherever I went, recording my every move, detailing every change in my circumstances. For the rest of my life, I will have an electronic file on me whose contents I may never see. No matter where I go this new file will be a burden that I will have to carry until my dying day. [Source]

During the term of the now disgraced former security chief Zhou Yongkang from 2007 to 2012, “internal security” became the party’s top priority. Between 2010 and this year, public security spending rose nearly 70 per cent.

For years, the Ministry of Finance has listed “other public safety spending” in its public security budget alongside mundane items such as armed police and the judiciary. But this was absent in the latest budget, announced on March 25.

Authorities allegedly spent 9.5 million yuan (HK$11.6 million) a year during the 19-month house arrest of rights activist Chen Guangcheng , before his escape to the US embassy in Beijing in 2012. From security equipment to personnel, Chen’s detention “has become a lucrative industry” for his poor Shandong native village, The New York Times wrote. And we are talking about just one dissident.

Professor Ding Xueliang, in a 2012 article on the daily’s Chinese website, said stability maintenance was the “second worst” option. For all its social and human costs, its “only merit” lay in avoiding the full-fledged military action seen in June 1989, which was the worst option. The question is, besides the worst and the second worst, is there a better option? [Source]

Negotiating Washington’s corridors of power will not be easy for Chen, who grew up in a poor village of 500 farmers and whose disability prevented him from starting school until he was 18. Yet he managed well during his two years in New York, apart from the widely-publicized and unfortunate spat that occurred when his comfortable fellowship at New York University came to its long-scheduled end. That incident cost him a significant amount of the overwhelming public support that had greeted him in New York. It has also made some other universities more skittish than ever about hosting other deserving dissidents at a time when American campuses and scholars are struggling to decide to what extent and under what conditions they should cooperate with Chinese educators and officials at home and in China.

Yet, contrary to the distorted image portrayed in “House of Cards,” Washington is made of sturdier stuff, and Chen will have the benefit of favorable ties that he has already forged in both the Republican and Democratic parties on Capitol Hill and in the NGO human rights community, where some earlier dynamic refugees from Chinese Communist oppression have attained substantial influence. [Source]

Cohen also looks back to the tangled aftermath of Chen’s shocking escape from siege-like house arrest in 2012. Comparing various accounts, Cohen writes that the story “would be a worthy sequel to the classic post-World War II Japanese film Rashomon.”

[…] Mrs. Clinton’s commitment to human rights is an important component of her thinking about China—and part of what makes her so good on China policy matters–but the long account about Mr. Chen also could distract from her larger observations about how to handle Beijing.

[…] There is a firmness in Hillary Clinton’s thinking about China that provides a good guide to policy and that is less well articulated by the current Obama team. She makes issues easy to understand. The clarity of her thinking, respect for China and awareness of how assertive it can be—and the stakes for the U.S.–bode well for how she would handle Beijing as president. [Source]

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/07/jerome-cohen-chen-guangcheng-goes-washington/feed/0Beijing’s Propaganda Crisis & the Rise of “Self-Media”http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/03/beijings-propaganda-crisis-rise-self-media/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/03/beijings-propaganda-crisis-rise-self-media/#commentsMon, 17 Mar 2014 20:27:42 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=170383At The New York Times, author Murong Xuecun describes the erosion of the government’s former monopoly over China’s news diet, and of his own faith in state broadcaster CCTV:

The Internet changed everything.

[…] My faith in CCTV began to falter in 1999, when I started to read accounts online that contradicted the CCTV versions of the 1958-1962 Great Famine, in which millions died. CCTV claimed that China was afflicted during that time by years of natural disasters. It described the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 as “a counter-revolutionary riot.”

Now, I see the network’s failures every day. CCTV did not utter a word when Chen Guangcheng, the blind human rights lawyer, was illegally held under house arrest. It said nothing about the unusual circumstances of the dissident Li Wangyang’s death. CCTV still says nothing about the real reasons more than 100 Tibetans have died in self-immolations in recent years. And every year, when thousands of protests against injustices in every part of China occur, CCTV is silent.

Most recently, the day after an airliner en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing mysteriously disappeared, a CCTV news presenter started the program with a report on the National People’s Congress. While the nation was desperate for news about the 153 Chinese people onboard the plane, CCTV chose to focus on a conclave of rubber-stamp voting sessions. [Source]

Michelle Song, 24, studies international relations at Beijing’s prestigious Peking University and lives in a dormitory, so she doesn’t watch television regularly and doesn’t subscribe to newspapers. But this has not hampered her ability to keep up with the headlines: Like many Chinese, Song uses her smart phone to forage for breaking news. Over the past year, she’s increasingly come to rely on a new tool: WeChat, a social messaging app owned by Shenzhen-based Tencent Holdings Ltd that was launched in January, 2011. […]

WeChat’s emergence as a news-sharing tool has much to do with its reputation as a place where people can easily transmit sensitive content that can’t be seen elsewhere because of China’s tight news and Internet censorship. WeChat has proved to be an ideal environment for so-called “self-media”: news feeds on a wide variety of topics that are created, or at least collated by, individuals and small groups with no media organization to fund them — or censor them. This emerging environment was shaken Thursday by the sudden shutdown of dozens of WeChat news feeds, a move that many interpreted as an attempt to rein in the platform’s freewheeling spirit. […]

The culling of so many accounts, melodramatically dubbed the “WeChat Massacre” by some Chinese media, was chilling — but it wasn’t fatal. […] [Source]

In the months since Chen left NYU, his appearance has changed little — his hair is slightly greyer, his suit better-fitting — but his image in the United States has grown far more complicated. […]

At dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant in downtown Washington that evening, Chen spoke about his perceived affiliation with reactionary Christianity. “I don’t believe in any religion,” he said firmly, in between bites of kebab, and sips of tea. His wife, Yuan Weijing, who joined him for dinner — along with Chen’s brother, who sat alone at a nearby table and looked pleased just to be in the United States — added: “He only believes in truth and facts.”

Chen pointed out that, beyond his ties to the Witherspoon Institute, he’s also affiliated with the Catholic University of America, and the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. Anyone who pays attention to human rights in China, who supports Chinese constitutional democracy, he said, is a friend. “Who’s right-wing or left-wing might be important to Americans,” his wife said. “Chen really doesn’t care.” [Source]

Professor Cohen and NYU have confirmed that, contrary to media reports, an iPad and iPhone given to Mr. Chen by China Aid contained no software designed to monitor communications or spy on Mr. Chen. Professor Cohen and NYU regret that media reports may have had any negative impact on Bob Fu, his wife Heidi Cai, or China Aid. Reverend Fu and China Aid recognize the important contributions of Professor Cohen to the cause of human rights in China and believe that his and NYU’s statements in connection with this matter were made in good faith based on a misunderstanding of technology. [Source]

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/12/chen-guangcheng-spyware-claims-misunderstanding/feed/0Li Qun: Maintain Stability After Qingdao Explosionhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/11/li-qun-maintain-stability-qingdao-explosion/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/11/li-qun-maintain-stability-qingdao-explosion/#commentsWed, 27 Nov 2013 23:31:14 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=165954Protesters in Qingdao. (@青岛小麦823/Weibo)
Residents of Huangdao, the district of Qingdao where an oil pipeline explosion last Friday has left 55 dead and over 100 injured,]]>

[we] must strengthen control of social stability, strike hard against criminal behavior, protect the lives and assets of the masses, scour the land investigating people to find lawbreakers deceiving others with rumors, and guarantee the overall stability of society.

Netizens quickly picked up on the phrase “scour the land investigating people” as evidence that the Qingdao government is ramping up stability maintenance.

Li Qun has previously claimed to have been a mayoral aide in the U.S., a claim met with skepticism from many netizens. On December 5, 2011, CDT found that the keywords Li Qun’s name (李群) and the title of his book I Was a Mayoral Aide in the U.S. (我在美国当市长助理) were both blocked from Sina Weibo search results (see our sensitive words spreadsheet).

Li Qun was the Party secretary of Linyi, Shandong from 2002 to 2007. Chen Guangcheng, the blind lawyer who escaped house arrest and came to the U.S. in 2012, was arrested and imprisoned during Li’s tenure.

But Li’s current Weibo critics are focused on today’s statement, which they believe stresses social stability and quelling rumors at a time when people’s safety should be at the forefront.

@酘薿翫: This stinks to high heaven. The one he needs to investigate is himself.

臭不要脸的，最该查的是他自己

@行宫流水: In his long tenure in Qingdao, Secretary Li has ignored the improper construction of the Sinopec pipeline. He’s the one who most deserves punishment.

在青岛的土地上，李书记长期无视中石化违规的管道建设，最该受罚

@SweetTears: When a disaster like this happens, the Party’s top priority is to suppress public opinion.

发生了这种灾难，党的首要目标是镇压舆论。

@骑士精神: Did 55 people die of rumormongering?!

那五十几条命是被造谣死的吗？!

@江畔愁雲: Social stability doesn’t depend on violence and suppression. If you do [your job] right and have the support of the people, there’s no need to fear rumors.

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/11/li-qun-maintain-stability-qingdao-explosion/feed/0Friends Like These: Chen Guangcheng in Americahttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/11/friends-like-chen-guangcheng-america/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/11/friends-like-chen-guangcheng-america/#commentsMon, 25 Nov 2013 21:00:25 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=165855It has now been a year and a half since legal activist Chen Guangcheng staged his dramatic escape from illegal house arrest in Shandong and fled to the U.S. embassy, eventually landing in New York as a visiting scholar at the NYU Law School. Chen left NYU this spring under a cloud of controversy after he accused the university of succumbing to pressure from the Chinese government to terminate his contract there, an accusation the university and affiliated supporters of Chen have denied.

It was never going to be straightforward for a so-called barefoot lawyer from rural China to find his feet on Manhattan asphalt. Chen thought he’d just be studying law. He ended up also getting a crash course in America’s culture wars. It was a predicament that would define his first year in the United States, where he found himself depending on the guidance of people who made no secret of the fact they did not entirely trust one another and were unable to cooperate.

Chen speaks little English, and so relies on others to translate his words. He was blinded by a childhood fever, and so relies on others to lead him around unfamiliar spaces. He had never lived outside China, and so depended on others to describe the ways of his new home. But America can seem a very different place when viewed from Midland, Texas, than it does from New York. Much of his time here can be seen as a battle, gradually ceded by those at NYU, over who could be considered the most careful custodian of his voice and his surest guide.

At first, that role belonged to Cohen. Besides avoiding abortion talk, Cohen told Fu that day in the park that he also thought Chen should steer clear of politicians, at least in public, until the 2012 presidential election had passed. He worried that Chen’s voice might be easier to dismiss if it came with a religious or partisan echo.

“Maybe he wanted to build a united front with me,” Fu says of Cohen, “and maybe he already put me in the column of pro-life, religious, evangelical, right-wing – you know, I don’t know this mentality.”

If there ever was an alliance between Fu and Cohen, it dissolved within days of Chen arriving in New York. [Source]

Read more about Chen’s journey to the U.S. and his first year in New York, via CDT:

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/11/friends-like-chen-guangcheng-america/feed/0Chen Guangcheng’s Family To Visit New Yorkhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/10/chen-guangchengs-family-visit-new-york/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/10/chen-guangchengs-family-visit-new-york/#commentsSun, 27 Oct 2013 23:58:25 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=164569The Associated Press reports that Chen Guangcheng’s mother and brother have been granted visas to visit him in New York:

The brother, Chen Guangfu, said on Saturday that he and his mother, Wang Jinxiang, were given the visas on Thursday and will soon travel to New York, where Chen Guangcheng lives with his wife and two children.

“Mum has always wanted to see Guangcheng, but it is not likely for him to return home for the time being. I am fulfilling her wish,” Chen Guangfu said of his mother, who is around 80 years old.

“When Bo Xilai’s right-hand man, the police chief, showed up in a consulate asking for asylum, he did not fit any of the categories for the United States giving him asylum,” Clinton said. “He had a record of corruption, of thuggishness, brutality. He was an enforcer for Bo Xilai.”

[…] Wang “kept saying that he wanted to get the truth to Beijing. He wanted the government in Beijing to know what was happening. So we said: ‘We can arrange that.’ So indeed that’s what we did. We were very discreet about it and did not try to embarrass anybody involved in it, but tried to handle it in a very professional manner, which I think we accomplished.”

[…] “I get called late one night about Chen,” Clinton said. “It was about a week before our annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue meeting, this time in Beijing. I was very well aware that this would be an issue in the relationship. But I also believed that this was an example of American values in practice. This was a man who, yes, deserved American support and attention and protection,” she said. [Source]

Clinton described the two events as examples of an improvisational streak in Washington’s behavior. “I came to believe that the Chinese, for their own reasons and because of their own way of governing, believed that somewhere in Washington there is a master plan about what we intend to do to try to control their rise. […] They have never understood the jazz-like quality of American government and democracy.” Read more in the full transcript (PDF), or watch below: